â€śWhy do whites love ouija boards?â€ť asks a particularly trenchant internet meme. â€śIf they want to learn about demons they can just go to ancestry.com.â€ť Sharp, but not wrong.

In Vazante, the first solo-directed feature by Brazilian filmmaker Daniela Thomas, we see some demons up close. In fact, Inti Brionesâ€™ rich black and white cinematography ensures that we perceive every wrinkle, sty, nook and cranny in the faces of the oppressors and the oppressed alike. Pictorially, Vazante (translating to English roughly as â€śebb tideâ€ť) is unimpeachable, and more than once I felt its images might enjoy a gainful second life in a coffee-table book. â€śThatâ€™s lovely,â€ť Iâ€™d say, or â€śAh, the poetry of the muddy, puddly ground underneath the bare, shivering feet of African slaves trudging towards the failing diamond mine where they work,â€ť and the aesthetics of the slavesâ€™ anguish outweigh, I am afraid, the politics or reality of it.

I donâ€™t suspect or accuse Daniela Thomas of amoral motives. I simply think she fell inadvertently into a Riefenstahl-like elevation of an evocation of time and place through picture and sound, at the expense of conveying much emotion about what happened in that time and place. The similarly rigorously archaic The Witch seemed to unearth themes and modern resonances from the arid soil of its milieu (and made us feel things â€” sometimes deeply divided things â€” about its people and their actions). Vazante seems neutral, at best, about the inhumanity it shows us. The owners and drivers of slaves donâ€™t twirl their mustaches with wretched glee, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained or even Michael Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave. Thomas has said she wanted to avoid the sort of exploitative, eroticized sadism of many slave narratives, and yet thereâ€™s not much here to replace those tropes. We donâ€™t really get inside anyoneâ€™s head.

Worse, the plot carries a whiff of soap opera. At the start, the initial protagonist, slaveowner Antonio (Adriano Carvalho), arrives home to find that his wife has died in childbirth, as has their child. Despondent, Antonio drifts around for a while. Then he marries his 12-year-old niece Beatriz (Luana Nastas), while dallying with (well, technically raping) his slave Feliciana (Jai Baptista). Meanwhile, Beatriz develops her own thing with Felicianaâ€™s son Virgilio (Vinicius Dos Anjos), who may or may not be Antonioâ€™s son out of wedlock. Antonio lying morosely in his hammock becomes an almost amusingly frequent recurring image. So do scenes of Beatriz moping around Antonioâ€™s house. Frankly, the movie starts to seem padded out, and fetishistically devoted to its visual scheme. Weâ€™re drawn to Beatriz largely because sheâ€™s virtually the only one we see smiling ever, not that a dour countenance would be uncalled-for in this story. But itâ€™d be nice to have some levity, some lightness, even some music (aside from sparse singing and some tones under the end credits, there is none).